Going back a few years when Brian & Olivia still lived in the fair town of London, we had a nice little get together involving a few vino rossos, a healthy amount of the talking of bullshit, and for some reason which now escapes me, the giving of some gifts. Was it Christmas? Hanged if I can remember. But that’s hardly the point.
Catrin bestowed on me the utterly practical gift of a set of Reservoir Ducks: a gaggle of plastic ducks sporting ties and dark glasses (and only a natty black hat short of being The Blues Brothers). The neat part was when you put them in water they lit up from an internal LED, and as they sat there they’d cycle through a load of colours. So that was nice.
I don’t remember whether Brian had recently bought himself a new camera, or whether they were just amusing little things, but there were various photos taken of the little luminous canards, and we whiled away the evening talking about this and that, and seeing whether it was possible to get a plastic duck into a wine glass (it was).
None of us really thought much more of it until earlier this year when Brian was contacted by an elderly person in the United States of America. They’d stumbled across Brian’s photo in his Flickr gallery – obviously having taken quite a shine to it – and contacted him to ask his permission to turn it into a painting! And so that’s exactly what happened. And here it is:
Cool, huh?
Thanks M. Shoaf, who.wherever you are. Looking at this makes me smile, every time.